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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26352613">even on the darkest nights</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/'>Anonymous</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Forced Prostitution, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Rescue, Torture</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 04:56:28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,580</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26352613</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Nicolò surges awake, gasping, choking on a scream that doesn’t belong to him. He claws at his throat, overwhelmed, until Andromache’s voice says, sharply, “Stop that. It’s not you. You can breathe.”</p><p>(Or: Nicolò dies at Jersualem, and wakes to find Andromache waiting for him. Yusuf survives the first battle, but that might be worse.)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, joe | yusuf al-kaysani/original characters</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>236</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Anonymous</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>even on the darkest nights</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is for a prompt on <a href="https://theoldguardkinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/1106.html?thread=132946#cmt132946">The Old Guard Kinkmeme:</a> </p><p>AU where instead of Joe and Nicky finding each other, it's Nicky and Andy first. And then they start having dreams of a new immortal and it's clear from their dreams that he basically got fucked to death. As they desperately race to find him (you know, as quickly as one can get anywhere in the world in whatever long ago century you want this to be set in) they have more dreams of him getting fucked and tortured to death, over and over, because as his healing abilities are discovered he becomes a prize at the brothel, fetching extremely high prices from people who would pay anything to be able to to do incredibly sadistic acts that would normally kill someone.</p><p>They finally get to him and rescue him, and then it's a long road to getting him to trust them, over the course of which he and Nicky fall in love.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Nicolò surges awake, gasping, choking on a scream that doesn’t belong to him. He claws at his throat, overwhelmed, until Andromache’s voice says, sharply, “Stop that. It’s not you. You can breathe.”<br/>
<br/>
She’s up already. They were sleeping back-to-back, and she’s still close enough that he can feel the warmth of her body through both their clothes. Her head is tilted toward the moonlight, a blade gleaming in one hand. As Nicolò watches, she sets it aside, pushes her hair out of her face with both hands, then drives her fists into the packed dirt hard enough to break bone. <em>“Fuck.”</em><br/>
<br/>
“What—” Nicolò clears his throat. The images are disjointed and horrible, and horribly vivid in a way that’s entirely too familiar. That he remembers from waking up on a battlefield to the smell of death and the shriek of the crows, dreaming of Andromache across hundreds of leagues.<br/>
<br/>
This dream was of a man, dark-haired and dark-eyed, naked and struggling beneath the weight of several other bodies. Lashing out and being struck hard, and the echo of terrible, mocking laughter as one of them wound a scarf around his neck and <em>pulled—</em><br/>
<br/>
“That was another one like us. I felt him die.” He shakes his head, rubs his throat, the phantom echo of that ache. “I felt him come back.”<br/>
<br/>
She nods shortly without looking up or speaking. Nicolò closes his eyes. He almost considers asking <em>what happened to him,</em> but he knows. He’s been in war; he knows that for all the atrocities of the battlefield, what befalls the conquered afterward is often worse.<br/>
<br/>
“We need to get to him. To save him.”<br/>
<br/>
“He’s like us. He’ll heal,” Andromache says. She sounds indifferent, but she’s already packing, scuffing dirt over the embers of the fire and rolling up the bedclothes, checking her boots for scorpions before pulling them on. Nicolò follows more slowly, still disoriented. He doesn’t know how she can be so steady with herself when he still feels like he’s ringing with the echo of a dying man’s last breaths. His pain and fear and fury.<br/>
<br/>
Andromache is like a force of nature when it suits her; he’s never asked how old she is, mostly because he knows she wouldn’t answer, but he knows that she was living and dying and living again long before his father’s father first drew breath. Long before.<br/>
<br/>
He knows that she’s calloused against the hurts of the world, but not numb to them. “They’ll hurt him again.”<br/>
<br/>
“And he’ll heal again.” She’s unhobbling the horses, stroking an absent hand over the flank of her dun mare as it lips affectionately at her hair. “Think. What did you see?”<br/>
<br/>
Nicolò breathes out, scrubs a hand through his hair and over his beard, trying to think. To focus on the details beyond the horror of it. “It was… a dark room. Oil lamps. Zellīj tiles on the floor. Painted walls.” A fine torture chamber, its luxury a hideous contrast to the brutality he’d seen. “I saw no windows.”<br/>
<br/>
“They spoke Sabir,” Andromache says, strapping down her pack with quick motions. “The men who were raping him.”<br/>
<br/>
Nicolò flinches slightly to hear her say it so baldly, but he rallies nonetheless. “That doesn’t narrow it down much.”<br/>
<br/>
“It gives us a direction, at least. One of them wore the cross.”<br/>
<br/>
“The Holy Land, really?”<br/>
<br/>
She snorts and starts on his pack. “You died at the gates of Jerusalem, Nicolò. Did you see anything holy there?”<br/>
<br/>
What he saw was blood and grief and men gutted like livestock to rot in the summer heat, and he knows that what went on behind those walls afterward was worse. But still. “Don’t, Andromache. Not now.”<br/>
<br/>
“Jerusalem,” she says again, firmly, and tosses him his pack. “Come on. If we ride hard, we can make Constantinople in three days. We’ll get passage from there. I know a man.” She shrugs contemplatively. “Or I did. It’s been a while. If he’s dead, we’ll find another way.”<br/>
<br/>
She swings up onto her horse without another word, and Nicolò shakes off the remnants of the dream and follows suit.<br/>
<br/>
It takes them two days to make Constantinople. Nicolò dreams of six more deaths in that time, each one worse than the one that preceded it.<br/>
<br/>
“They know what he is,” Andromache says on the third morning, cleaning her nails by the fish market and waiting for her man to arrive. She looks unaffected, but Nicolò suspects that it’s a mask. His own gut churns with sickened memory: coin changing hands, the dark-haired man spitting blood and defiance before he was pinned down with steel through his shoulders and chest and thighs and fucked savagely as he bled to death.<br/>
<br/>
And then woke up again. Healed again. Nicolò knows that lasting death is a mercy, but dear God that truth has never been so clear. There’s something like grief in him at the fact that this is their first meeting. There’s no clean death to be had on a battlefield, but at least on a battlefield he had a blade in his hand. At least he could fight.<br/>
<br/>
This man, this new immortal who haunts his dreams—he’d fight. Nicolò has watched him kill two of his captors while still in chains, and die two ugly deaths in reward; with steel and shield in hand he’d be unstoppable. An angel of death.<br/>
<br/>
<em>We’re coming,</em> he thinks, shaping the words in his mind as if the man could hear them, as if he could understand them when every curse Nicolò has heard from him was in an unfamiliar tongue. <em>We’re coming, please hold on.</em><br/>
<br/>
The truth, of course, the terrible truth, is that he will hold on, because there is no other choice.<br/>
<br/>
<em>We're coming for you, I promise,</em> Nicolò whispers, and closes his eyes to the salt breeze.</p>
<hr/><p>In the dark space between dying and waking, Yusuf dreams of pale-eyed warriors riding hard across the dry earth. Two of them, a woman and a man dressed for the desert, bent low over their horses with dust rising up behind them. It’s not the first time they’ve appeared to him, and he hasn’t yet decided whether they’re anything more than conjurings of his desperate mind. He’s not entirely sure that it matters when he seems destined to live out his days in chains for the pleasure of these Frankish ghouls, living and dying and living again.<br/>
<br/>
They seem endless, and endlessly creative in their cruelty. One well-dressed man doesn’t even disrobe; he simply spends hours flaying Yusuf alive, peeling back strips of skin and watching as the flesh beneath them heals. He questions Yusuf from time to time, idly curious, and Yusuf doesn’t answer. He understands the Sabir that these Franks speak to one another, but he’s kept that fact to himself. He has few enough advantages already.<br/>
<br/>
Instead he spits the foulest Derja curses he can think of and fights in his chains until the man finally grows bored and slits his throat. Yusuf bleeds out hoping, as he always does now, that this death will be his last.<br/>
<br/>
He wakes in chains, clean of blood, as always without a single mark on him. Often there is already another torturer at hand, always there are guards, but for now the room is empty.<br/>
<br/>
There are shouts coming from the floor below. Shouts, and the clash of steel, and the part of Yusuf that was a warrior in another life has him sitting up, a swift movement aborted by the pull of his chains. They’ve learned their lesson since he strangled a man with them; there’s enough give for his torturers to reposition him to their liking, but not nearly enough to allow him free movement.<br/>
<br/>
Yusuf swears under his breath, grits his teeth, and breaks his right thumb. Even so, it’s a grindingly painful effort to get the cuff off. He’s tried this before and never managed to get himself completely free before someone put a blade through his throat or worse, but from the sounds of carnage below, he thinks his captors must be distracted. Distracted enough, perhaps, to grant him this one precious chance at escape.<br/>
<br/>
He frees his other hand and is struggling with the iron cuffs around his feet when he hears footsteps on the stairs, a man’s voice cursing in a tongue he doesn’t speak, and no, <em>no,</em> not now, not when he’s so close. Yusuf yanks frantically at the metal, grinding it painfully into his flesh.<br/>
<br/>
There’s a clash of steel, a scream. The door swings open, and a corpse falls to the floor. A moment later, it’s kicked aside and a man steps through.<br/>
<br/>
He’s tall, fair-haired and handsome with a blooded sword in his hand. As Yusuf watches, he stoops to clean it on the dead man’s tabard, smearing blood over the cross, then lifts his head. His eyes are wide and pale, and <em>familiar</em>, an apparition of dreams stepping into the waking world.<br/>
<br/>
“I’m going mad,” Yusuf says out loud. The man blinks at him, then sheaths his sword and starts across the room, moving with deadly purpose. There are more footsteps on the stairs, and then the woman appears behind him, stepping over the corpse without a second glance. There’s an axe in her hand, dripping gore.<br/>
<br/>
The man reaches for Yusuf and Yusuf kicks out hard, feeling bone crunch beneath his foot. He renews his struggles to free himself, desperate now. These two can certainly kill him, but if they don’t know he can come back he may have the element of surprise.<br/>
<br/>
“Stop that, you fool, we’re rescuing you,” the woman says in Arabic, thickly accented.<br/>
<br/>
It’s enough of a shock that Yusuf stills for a moment, and the man kneels down beside him, keeping a wise distance this time. His expression is earnest even with blood flowing from his broken nose down over his chin. He pats his chest. “Nicolò. My name. Nicolò di Genova.”<br/>
<br/>
His accent is even worse than the woman’s. Yusuf stares between them for a moment, then says, in Sabir, “What do a pair of Franks want with me? And why should I trust you?”<br/>
<br/>
The man starts when he speaks. The woman laughs, roughly and without humor. “I’m no Frank. You can call me Andromache.”<br/>
<br/>
“As far as the rest,” the man who called himself Nicolò says, still so wide-eyed and earnest. “We are—like you. We’ve dreamed of you, since—”<br/>
<br/>
“Since you died for the first time,” the woman finishes bluntly, ignoring Yusuf’s flinch. “Hold still. I’ll get those cuffs off of you.”<br/>
<br/>
“Andromache,” says the man, sounding wary, but it’s too late. Steel flashes, and an instant later Yusuf’s lower legs explode into agony, the sickening feeling of flesh and bone coming cleanly apart. He howls, and cannot even fight against the hands that grip his legs, pulling at him. When he blinks his streaming eyes open, blood is soaking into the sheets beneath him, and the Frank is holding his amputated feet back against the ankles. The chains have been tossed aside. Yusuf gasps at the ceiling, feeling his flesh begin to knit itself back together, as the man says reproachfully to his companion, “That wasn’t kind.”<br/>
<br/>
“It was efficient,” she retorts, unapologetic. “We need to move. There’ll be more of them soon.”<br/>
<br/>
“Give him a moment.”<br/>
<br/>
“Don’t speak for me,” Yusuf snarls, pulling away. Pain stabs up his shins, then subsides as the bones snap into place. The man sits back on his heels, wiping blood from his face with the back of his sleeve; sure enough, his nose has already healed, the bleeding stopped.<br/>
<br/>
“Forgive me,” he says carefully.<br/>
<br/>
Yusuf sneers at him, swinging his legs off the bed. Standing like this, he’s more aware of his nakedness than he has been in weeks. More aware than he wants to be that these two strangers have been dreaming of every violation and humiliation he’s endured since this nightmare started. He wants to cover himself; instead he squares his shoulders and glares.<br/>
<br/>
The woman meets his eyes evenly. “You don’t have to come with us. But we can get you out of the city, if you want.”<br/>
<br/>
Her steady, unsympathetic calm is in some ways easier to take in this moment than the man’s gentleness. And anyway, it's not like he has much choice. He nods jerkily. “Fine.”<br/>
<br/>
The man straightens up and takes a step back, out of Yusuf’s space. Quietly, he says, “What should we call you?”</p><p>“Yusuf.” His name drops from his lips before he’s even aware of his intention to speak. He has already decided to trust them, he realizes with an odd jolt. Maybe it’s just that even the dreams of them were the only things for so long that didn’t hurt. Maybe it’s something else entirely.  “My name is Yusuf.”</p>
<hr/><p>They burn the house where Yusuf was being held to the ground; Andromache liberates the horses on the way out with all the competent pragmatism of the bandit Nicolò sometimes suspects her of being. Yusuf, who gives them no more of a name than that, rides like a man born to the saddle.<br/>
<br/>
He trades the sword he took from a Genoese corpse for a curving one of Persian make at the first marketplace they come across. Nicolò watches him with the armorer, exchanging pleasantries with a broad smile that transforms his handsome face. He watches the smile slide away like water as Yusuf returns to them. Andromache is haggling in Greek with an old woman selling olives, so it’s only Nicolò watching him: his strong shoulders and his dark curls uncovered in the hot sun, the blade at his hip and the sureness of his stride. Even the resigned wariness in his eyes. He could be wrong—he has been so terribly wrong about so many things in recent years—but Nicolò thinks that it’s a more honest expression than the smile was.<br/>
<br/>
He rubs at his chest. There’s an ache there like he’s been struck.<br/>
<br/>
They’re heading back toward Constantinople. There’s a fourth immortal who has begun to haunt Nicolò’s dreams. Probably Yusuf’s as well, although he hasn’t spoken of it in the rare times he chooses to speak at all.<br/>
<br/>
“Quynh,” Andromache says when he gasps awake for the first time to the dream of a dark-eyed woman on horseback, standing in the stirrups to fire a bow again and again, as smoothly and flawlessly as if it’s a part of her body. “Her name is Quynh. She’ll meet us in the mountains.”<br/>
<br/>
Her voice is softer than he’s known it to be in the months of their acquaintance, her eyes faraway and fond.<br/>
<br/>
“You know her,” Nicolò says.<br/>
<br/>
“I’ve known her for a very long time,” Andromache agrees, and there’s a secret warmth to her smile as she leans down to rake back the coals over the coney they’re roasting. Nicolò looks at her and then, suddenly, he understands.<br/>
<br/>
On the other side of the fire, Yusuf watches them silently, his eyes shadowed. As far as Nicolò can tell, he doesn’t sleep. Nicolò wakes every morning expecting him to have vanished in the night. Every morning, though, he’s still there: pacing the camp or praying on the small mat he carries with him, facing to the west; sometimes just sitting with his arms draped across his knees and a faraway expression on his face. Nicolò wonders what he’s thinking of in those moments, but he doesn’t ask.<br/>
<br/>
He rides with them, he eats with them. He circles them warily, as though he’s always on guard for a betrayal or a blow, but he does not leave.<br/>
<br/>
</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
Yusuf cannot explain, even to himself, why he continues to ride with the two Franks after they carve their bloody path out of al-Quds. For the first three nights he sleeps not at all, expecting some kind of terrible duplicity. There is none. The woman Andromache sleeps heavily, seemingly indifferent to her thin bed roll and the rocky soil beneath it, to the possibility of an attack in the night. The Genoan is more restless—less accustomed to rough travel, Yusuf thinks, though the man is deadly in a fight—but he, too, sleeps. There are no raiders in the night. No slave traders with bags of gold to trade for Yusuf and his body that will bleed and break again and again for an inventive torturer.<br/>
<br/>
He dreamed of them. They heal like he does. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything; Yusuf is familiar with the sorts of betrayals that people will inflict on their own kin for the right price.<br/>
<br/>
He cannot stay awake forever, though. Whatever has happened to him to keep him living when Allah should have seen him dead dozens of times over, he is still only a man. On the fourth night, the dying coals of the fire swim before his eyes as his companions’ snores rise up through the dark. In the far distance, Yusuf can hear the high clear voice of a young shepherd calling his flock home. Above them stars prick the night sky, and the smell of asphodel is in the air.<br/>
<br/>
He isn’t aware of slipping away into sleep.<br/>
<br/>
He wakes in the thin dawn to the echoes of a fading dream and the Genoan who calls himself Nicolò watching him carefully from across the fire, which has been coaxed to a flickering flame. Andromache is already by the horses, packing with the quick surety of a woman who could do the task blindfolded.<br/>
<br/>
“Are you alright?” Nicolò asks in his atrocious Arabic. His eyes, Yusuf notices, are the exact same shade of pale blue as the early morning sky above them.<br/>
<br/>
Yusuf nods sharply. His heart is beating fast. From the dream, perhaps. “Yes. Fine.”<br/>
<br/>
Nicolò nods as well. He shifts as if he means to stand, then settles back down. In his dusty leathers, he looks tired. Young. Yusuf wonders, for the first time, how long it’s been since he first died. He knows without asking that Andromache is older than either of them by several lifetimes, but Nicolò—<br/>
<br/>
Nicolò seems young. Especially now. He looks away for a moment, then clears his throat, then says, “In Constantinople—we mean to seek the other one. Quynh. Andromache knows her.”<br/>
<br/>
The archer from his dreams. Yusuf nods sharply. Of course they do. Andromache loves her, in the rough way that a woman like Andromache is able to love anyone. Yusuf hasn’t inserted himself into their conversations, but he isn’t deaf. And he isn’t oblivious to the fact that they both speak Arabic around him, although it’s abundantly clear that it is neither of their native tongue. It’s as though they’re inviting him to eavesdrop. He doesn’t know what to make of that.<br/>
<br/>
“Yes,” he says, when it becomes clear that Nicolò is waiting for a response.<br/>
<br/>
“Yes,” Nicolò echoes. “But you—if you want to find passage somewhere else, if you want to go home, wherever home is for you—” he breaks off, then says, “You don’t have to come with us if you don’t want to. That’s all.”<br/>
<br/>
“What he means,” Andromache says dryly from above them, “is that we’re not slavers, and we don’t mean to keep you captive. If there’s somewhere else you want to go, we’ll pay your passage. Assuming we can afford it.”<br/>
<br/>
Yusuf considers that for a moment. Tunis, that grand metropolis that he hasn’t seen in five years; he could go back there and seek whatever kind of home he can find. There’s not much left for him there now, to be honest, with his mother dead and his living brothers scattered across the Maghreb. But that’s not what makes him shake his head. He’s not sure what does, exactly.<br/>
<br/>
Andromache’s steadiness, Nicolò’s earnest, handsome face. The fact that they rode for weeks across the desert on the strength of dreams alone to save him. The fact that he’s trusted them enough to sleep for the first time in weeks.<br/>
<br/>
“No,” he says finally. “No. I’ll come with you, if you’ll have me.”<br/>
<br/>
Andromache knocks Nicolò’s shoulder ungently.<br/>
<br/>
“Told you,” she says, and offers Yusuf a broad grin. “Good. We’ll be glad to have you.”<br/>
<br/>
She turns back to the horses. Nicolò ducks his head, but it’s not enough to hide his smile. “Are you sure?”<br/>
<br/>
“I’m sure,” Yusuf says, and feels—for the first time in months, maybe the first time since he died in horror and humiliation on a finely tiled floor and woke to find himself in an unending nightmare—as though he’s found some kind of surety. Some kind of steadiness beneath his feet.<br/>
<br/>
He waits until Nicolò lifts his eyes, then says again, deliberately, “I’m sure. I’ll stay with you.”<br/>
<br/>
</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
(A thousand years from now, in a cool green country across the sea, a woman who is like them but so very <em>young</em> will ask him about his first death, and Yusuf will say without any grief at all, “Like Nicky, I died in the Crusades. But that’s a long and unpleasant story for another time. Really, you should ask Andy about the time in Medina in 1431, with the poisoned dates—”<br/>
<br/>
“We agreed not to mention that,” Andromache will say, and Yusuf will laugh and say that he agreed to nothing, and on the other side of the table Nicolò will watch him with that same lovely, secret smile.)</p>
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